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Mobile site review: Interflora

Flower retailer Interflora has just launched a transactional mobile site, offering a limited range of the flowers and gifts that are available on the desktop website.

It’s a product which should be well suited to mobile, as it offers shoppers a chance to but last minute gifts when they cannot get to either a shop or a computer.

The fact that Interflora offers a same day delivery service if you order before 1pm makes it even more appealing, especially if you have forgotten someone’s birthday.

Most importantly, the site has followed best practice for mobiles and kept it simple for users, with a stripped down version of the standard website. Users can choose flowers in just a couple of steps, selecting the occassion they are intended for, then choosing from a limited range before deciding on a delivery date.

Interflora has provided two choices of payment method on the site; click to call or credit / debit card. Entering delivery addresses and card details on a small mobile screen is potentially tricky, so can this be made usable?

Address details are handled well, with Inteflora taking a postcode first before provide a list of possible addresses in a scrolling menu, which saves too much data entry:

Also, once you begin the checkout process, you know how many stages there are to go through. Eight may seem a lot, but it has been split over this many pages to make each step simpler. However, on slower mobile internet connections, loading so many pages could become a problem.

I think Interflora has made the payment process as easy as it could on a mobile site that has to cater for a range of handsets, and has created a usable mobile version of its site.

It should look at the kinds of mobiles that shoppers are accessing the site on and consider optimising for the most popular ones. I used an iPhone, and while it worked well in general, but I had to scroll sideways to find some of the links. An iPhone optimised site or app would do the job better.

It could also divert mobile users automatically to the most appropriate version of the site. I had to know the mobile URL first, which makes it less likely that Interflora will attract sales from people that type the brand into a search engine on their mobile.

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